The average Joe must have felt pretty good about himself in 1990 because he was the king of all media.

On Friday nights, he rented videos from Blockbuster. His home fax machine could deliver important documents to him. His beeper allowed him to stay in touch. He could bust a move on his IBM Selectric typewriter because it had autocorrect. He was set for the future.

Within five years, that life would be an anachronism. He had now acquired a primitive home computer, a dot-matrix printer and a shoe-sized cellphone. This, he thought, was the real deal.

Five years after that, he was building his DVD collection or would download movies illegally via his DSL line. His inkjet printer made perfect copies of his emails. His Nokia phone was the size of a butter dish. Finally, he said to himself, he was set.

Technology can be cruel to those who love it the most. While the rest of life ebbs and flows, technology changes like a tsunami. Things that are cool and edgy today become a punch line in a few years. Sidekick, iPod and Palm Pilot — come on down!

Some communications methods are only shells of their former selves.

Carrier pigeons once filled the skies, delivering messages with uncanny accuracy. These days, said local breeder Vern Clausen, the birds are bred by enthusiasts for amateur races.

The last telegraph will be sent sometime this month in India, the last nation with a substantial telegraph network, according to Forbes magazine. Morse code, which served as the language of the telegraph for a century, is nearly extinct. It's not required for getting an amateur radio license anymore, says ham operator L.T. “Skip” Stem, and exists only as an eccentricity.

Other technologies have held on, albeit barely.

The beeper has fared better than a lot of technologies.

“Back in the day,” said John Delgado, a former pager dealer, “everyone had a pager. I mean, kids, parents, grandma, and all of the cousins. If you had a pager, everyone had a direct link to you, no matter where you were.”

Pagers are still in demand, Delgado said, by hospitals and certain public safety agencies. They're cheap, he said, they're small, and the signal can carry into buildings where cellular phone signals won't penetrate.

Typewriters, once the most vital machine in an office, are still surprisingly popular, said Paul Daniel of American Typewriter, one of last locally owned typewriter shops in Texas.

For some businesses, he said, a typewriter is preferred over a computer.

“We love them,” said Kim Caddell of Pearsall Title Company. “And we use them a lot. When you have to add something new to a legal document, you can't do it with a computer.”

Their indexing system is also analog, she said, consisting of typed index cards. Using a computer would be too time-consuming.

When Europe was using newer, steam locomotives, America stuck with wood-burning locomotives because the U.S. had a lot of wood.

Citizens Band radio made the leap to consumers in the 1970s, then died as a popular toy. They're still used extensively, however, by millions of truck drivers.

The Internet bulletin board is another technology that has remained popular, she said. An early method of leaving and reacting to static messages on the Web, it survives against realtime technologies that use rich media.